NCCD Now: Youth Voices

NCCD Blog

NCCD Now: Youth Voices

With summer internship season winding down, NCCD is recognizing the students who have brought energy and fresh perspective to our work over the last several months.

For the second summer in a row, NCCD partnered with the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County to bring high school students into our Madison, Wisconsin, office for six weeks. As a vital service provider to youth in the community, the Boys and Girls Club has helped NCCD reach a diverse group of interns. Our hope is that by exposing young people to NCCD’s work, we will expand the longer-term pipeline to careers at NCCD and other nonprofits. At the same time, NCCD and its clients will benefit from new perspectives and approaches in its work.

The first blog post in our Youth Voices series was written by this summer’s Boys and Girls Club intern, Eduardo Castillo. A hard worker and bright spot in everyone’s day, Eduardo chose to write about staff diversity and inclusion training at NCCD. You can read that blog post here. To hear from last summer’s high school interns, click here.

Seven college students are spending their summer with NCCD, working with our research team and with SafeMeasures®, NCCD’s data reporting service. SafeMeasures intern Grace Li has written a blog post about her experience at NCCD, as has Rachel Polivka, a research intern in our Oakland, California, office.

Including the voices of young people has long been a focus of NCCD’s work. Our annual Media for a Just Society Awards include a category for Youth Media, which helps to further public understanding of the complex social systems we work to reform through the lenses of writers, filmmakers, and podcasters who are ages 25 and younger.

For the 2018 awards, currently in the judging stage, we decided to try something new: We recruited reviewers for this category who also fall into the 25-and-younger category. Once again, we called on Eduardo and Grace for their input. Two additional high school students, Jevona and Dario, rounded out this review group. An upcoming blog post will feature their feedback on the process of reviewing and ranking the submissions to our Media for a Just Society Youth Media category.

We hope you enjoy hearing from these youth as much as NCCD staff have enjoyed their presence and contributions.